Milt brings it, but says, “You ought to lay some food on top of that, Peter.”

So Pete orders a plate of fried clams and even eats a few dipped in tartar sauce while he drinks another couple of beers, and at some point, before moving on up the line to some other joint where he isn’t so well-known, he tries to call Jonesy, down there in Massachusetts. But Jonesy and Carla are enjoying the rare night out, he only gets the baby-sitter, who asks him if he wants to leave a message.

Pete almost says no, then reconsiders. “Just tell him Pete called. Tell him Pete said SSDD.”

“S… S… D… D.” She is writing it down. “Will he know what-”

“Oh yeah,” Pete says, “he’ll know.”

By midnight he’s drunk in some New Hampshire dive, the Muddy Rudder or maybe it’s the Ruddy Mother, he’s trying to tell some chick who’s as drunk as he is that once he really believed he was going to be the first man to set foot on Mars, and although she’s nodding and saying yeah-yeah-yeah, he has an idea that all she understands is that she’d like to get outside of one more coffee brandy before closing. And that’s okay. It doesn’t matter. Tomorrow he’ll wake up with a headache but he’ll go in to work just the same and maybe he’ll sell a car and maybe he won’t but either way things will go on. Maybe he’ll sell the burgundy Thunderbird, goodbye, sweetheart. Once things were different, but now they’re the same. He reckons he can live with that; for a guy like him, the rule of thumb is just SSDD, and so fucking what. You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER, sign on it.

In November he’ll go hunting with his friends, and that’s enough to took forward to… that, and maybe a big old sloppy-lipstick blowjob from this drunk chick out in his car. Wanting more is just a recipe for heartache.